Michael Gove’s overhaul of the curriculum puts coding at the heart of
education, combining computer science with IT and digital literacy, says
Rhiannon Williams

When Ross Lowe was six, he was already trying to play a game on his father’s computer. He began opening up menus, and before long he was creating his own short films in an editing suite.

He was coding at eight, and has since published apps in the Windows app store. Today Ross is 14, but only now has his school in Bedfordshire begun to teach him and his fellow Year 9 students programming. And while Ross is exceptional, he’s by no means unique.

“I enjoy the ability to create things, as someone my age can’t really go out and create a hard product,” he says. “But there’s software which allows you to make something new without any cost and share it for free.”

As children become increasingly au fait with technology and gadgets, the classroom is finally catching up with this new generation of digital natives. Gone are the blackboards and desks with ageing inkwells.

Modern classrooms are far more likely to be equipped with tablets, online learning hubs and interactive whiteboards, and are only going to move farther over to the digital side.

In 2012, Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Education, dismissed the current ICT (information and communications technology) curriculum as “harmful and dull”, announcing plans for a radical subject overhaul created in partnership with universities and firms including Facebook and Microsoft.

The reforms, which come into effect this September, combine computer science with information technology and digital literacy, with a much stronger emphasis on coding and programming than the previous syllabus.

Children from the age of five will now be taught to code and program with algorithms (formulas), and from 11 will learn programming languages, how to design and how instructions are stored and used within a computer system.

These are the skills, Gove argues, that will be in great demand within the future job market, giving children “the best possible start to their future”.

Claire Lotriet, ICT subject leader at Henwick Primary School, London, has already started making changes to the way she and fellow teachers are teaching the subject. “Children need a greater understanding of how computers and networks work, but it’s not all about teaching them to code,” she says.

“It’s about learning computational thought, and by the time they leave Year 6 I aim to empower them to make informed choices about the kind of tool they would use for a specific task.”

The main shift in the teaching of the subject, she says, is helping the child to create as well as simply consume the kind of media and content they enjoy online. “A lot of my pupils will use the internet in their free time, and we can teach them to create games and other content as well as watching and consuming them.”

Lotriet teaches ICT to Years 5 and 6 at the school in a “cross-disciplinary” way, integrating it into other subjects as much as possible. A recent project on natural disasters had pupils producing videos, blogs, live broadcasts and building Google sites, alongside basic animations of a volcanic explosion. Another project helped the children to create their own computer game, using mostly free software that could be downloaded at home.

“They loved it because it tapped into something they do so much in their free time anyway,” Lotriet says. “In making their own game, they don’t realise how much they’re learning.”

In an increasingly connected world, children are always going to embrace new technologies faster and more readily than their parents may realise, or teachers may be prepared for.

“When it comes to teaching computer science, many of us are starting from scratch,” Lotriet says. “With other subjects like maths which you learnt at school, you tend to have that framework for your teaching. With this, many teachers have never been taught it themselves.”

There is, she says, no need to fear the genuine possibility that a bright young student might know more than their teacher about building an app, or the complexities of coding.

“Children can be more confident or familiar with certain technologies, but they may not always know how to channel that into something useful. We’re expecting them to know more, and lots of schools are embracing that.”

British teenage tech entrepreneur Nick D’Aloisio is a shining example of a pupil whose understanding of ICT dramatically leapfrogged his own teachers’.

Having taught himself coding at the age of 12, D’Aloisio made several smartphone apps while at school before creating Summly, a news summarisation app he sold to Yahoo last year for a sum thought to be in the region of £20 million.

Now 18, D’Aloisio leads the team behind the Yahoo News Digest app, which boasts more than one million global users. His parents allowed him to leave King’s College School in Wimbledon in 2013 to concentrate on Summly – and study for his A-levels at home.

But it was web design lessons during Year 9 that helped to cement his interest in app development.

“The skills required for coding are very liberating, because not only do you understand the world around you, but you can also create, mould and shape things,” D’Aloisio says. “I think to have the technical capacity to just build is really powerful.”

Had D’Aloisio remained at school and not built Summly, he would have “absolutely loved” to have studied computer science and related subjects. “For someone growing up in the 21st century, within five to 10 years computer science will become one of our main focal points. It definitely needs to be within the curriculum.”

The heightened focus on computer science is what will help Britain to “produce the next Tim Berners-Lee”, according to Gove.

Steve Beswick, senior director of education at Microsoft UK, was among those consulted to make changes to the curriculum. “Eighty to 90 per cent of jobs today require IT knowledge, and that’s only going to increase,” he says.

“We work with around 35,000 partner companies across Britain who have vacancies of between five and 10 per cent, predominantly in the technical areas.

There is a skills gap at the moment, and we need to get to the point where the people coming out of education can fill those jobs. Across the IT industry, it’s our responsibility to help to close that.”

This integrated approach to ICT cannot only aid deeper understanding and engagement in all subjects, Beswick argues, but could help raise a generation of more culturally aware, knowledgeable humans.

“If the 10-year-olds of the future can grow up understanding multiculturalism through talking to other schools on a worldwide basis through the use of IT, I think that’s fantastic for a better world,” he says.

“Taking a long-term view over the next 10 years, if we can get a five or six-year-old really into computing, they might become the next Bill Gates.”

Ross Lowe showcased his app Face the Facts, which presents the user with a random fact they must decide is true or false, at the British Educational Training and Technology Show in January, where he met Gove.

“He liked it and said it was a good idea,” he says. “But I was told not to quiz him on it – I’d be in trouble if I quizzed him on it and he got it wrong.” In today’s digital age, however, few would be surprised to find teenagers outsmarting their elders.